“Hold up the colors you wear / You welcome me home, I won’t leave you alone / You are not alone” pleads a gentle voice on the other side of a vibrant string melody in “What Would I Know,” one of my favorite songs from the captivating String Ladders by The Color Forty Nine. At once imprisoned within the lyrics and impossible to escape in the adjacent flood of strings that accent the backdrop, a discordant harmony purveys without relying on the poeticisms of the verses alone in this song, and for the better part of String Ladders, that’s how The Color Forty Nine does most of their storytelling.
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The guitar strings are always a reinforcement of the emotions in “Another World,” “Hold My Hand,” “String Ladder,” and “Fly On” as opposed to being a centerpiece, as one might expect them to be in a folk album like this one. What makes this LP so such a fascinating piece is that no matter how formulaic its compositions get, they present the audience with such unpredictable twists and turns through their lyrical content and harmonies that we feel like we’re listening to something verging on revolutionary in spots. It’s familiar, and yet completely independent from anything in the mainstream.
This mix constricts around the vocals in “Battling Down” and the tense “I’m Going to Try” beautifully, emphasizing the isolated mentality of our singer quite profoundly in my opinion. In the past year, I’ve probably reviewed at least a couple of dozen so-called quarantine albums that have struggled to capture the same overwhelmingly claustrophobic sensibility this record has, and I think that’s because of the obvious detail that went into both sides of The Color Forty Nine’s development process. The details don’t die with the performance in this LP but instead spread to the post-recording construction of the tracklist.
Singularity is the great theme of String Ladders, both lyrically and instrumentally speaking, which is rather ironic when taking into account how multilayered a sound we come across in some of the tracks here. Ultimately, there aren’t a lot of bells and whistles in the music – other than a guitar and a dark lead vocal, the melodic wealth of this LP is measured by the absence of filler rather than the presence of grandiosity. With less to obstruct our view, we can see just how much The Color Forty Nine can give with virtually nothing to give their sound a boost.
It’s really easy to get lost in the intellectual elements of String Ladders, but at the end of the day, this is an album that doesn’t score most of its points on the strength of intricacy and charisma exclusively. Songs like “Fly On” and “Hold My Hand” appeal to the instinctual as opposed to the cerebral, and in an era that is lauding the latter, making something a little more primeval took some courage on the part of this California crew. At any rate, they’ve got the right idea, and it’s leading them down quite the creative and stimulating path here.
Kim Muncie